nerdenstein wrote:Also, apparently Gunthers lines change slightly if you don't kill her but I'd need to check that...
They do.
No, I cannot forgive. No... not the killing of Agent Navarre. I will follow you. Denton, I will get you!
Is only played if you've actually killed her and:
You are a small, prowling mouse. And dumb like a mouse. You keep coming, like you forget about Agent Navarre. I remember Agent Navarre. I remember for everyone.
Becomes:
You are a small, prowling mouse. And dumb like a mouse. You keep coming, even though you know it is a trap.
Not exactly the biggest changes ever (though I could be forgetting something.) The thing is, even though they had that eventuality covered, the only way to have that come up is an exploit.
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Wasn't this game to be out sometime in August?
Ten days.
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What follows is long and off topic. Remember, this is about stuff the art director has said outside of the game. You have been warned.
justanotherfan wrote:What was the math stuff again, I forgot.
The big thing was a total lack of understanding of when, where, why, how and so on.
For example thinking that geometry was a creation of the Renaissance*. It is almost difficult to understand the scale on which that is wrong. I wish there were a way to explain how wrong that is as quickly as one can say the thing that is wrong.
The uncharitable way to look at it is to use absolute error. In that case it's like saying Deus Ex was released in the year 400 AD. You know, before the fall of Rome. Or you, to preserve the direction of the original error, it would be like saying Jesus showed up circa 1600 AD. The more charitable way of looking at it would be with a relative error. In which case it's like saying Hitler rose to power in 1992 AD.
Now whether we try to look at Deus Ex as a product of the late Roman Empire, or Hitler as a product of the political environment of the 1990s, we're probably going to come up with some objections. (The late Roman Empire was not known for it's video games, 1990s Germany probably wasn't very welcoming to Nazis.) These things do not exactly fit.
Pretty much the same is true the putting geometry in the Renaissance. The Renaissance wasn't exactly the most productive time for the geometry (or math in general, but it was even less productive for geometry than math as a whole.) I would argue that it laid the groundwork for later productivity, in fact math really seems to take off shortly after the Renaissance ends, but very little progress was made during it. (Also, it would still be another couple hundred years before a new geometry could be said to be created.)
The last big problem about making a mistake like that, whether it's dating Hitler to 1992 or Jesus to 1600, is that you have to completely ignore the effect the misdated thing has had on the world. It isn't just thinking that Hitler came into power in 1992, it is thinking that 1992, as it is known to us, came into existence without World War II. That idea, 1992 without WWII happening first, should set off some kind of alarm bell in your mind saying, "This is not the world I live in." The same would go for a year 1600 in which Christianity had never come into being. Math is obviously a somewhat more obscure subject for most people, so the bells might not ring, but it's the same kind of error.
Which is actually part of why a "The art director is an idiot" course would have the potential to be a really interesting course. It isn't enough to say, "He's wrong about when A was developed by B centuries," or, "He's wrong about the traditional color palette in ways X, Y, and Z," to truly grasp the degree to which he is wrong you'd have to understand the significance of the things he is wrong about. So you won't just have, "X happened on Y date," but instead, "X matters for Y reasons without which the word as you know it would not exist." That tends to make for a better class than rote memorization. Forming a web of connections for the things learned is generally better practice than rote.
Anyway that's the sort of thing he got wrong when it came to the history of math. Things that are as easy to say as, "Julius Caesar was the allied commander on D-Day," but require much more effort to explain the myriad ways in which they are wrong.
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I've actually noticed that some of the interviews with him appear to be disappearing off the face of the internet, thus sparing future generations. Perhaps one day someone will ask what things he's said that pissed me off, and I'll find that they've all been mercifully deleted.
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*There is, bizarrely,
a pseudo scientific theory based on claiming this kind of error is not an error at all. I don't know when it dates the creation geometry (it could actually be several centuries more accurate than JB in that regard) or anything else JB erroneously claims took place in the Renaissance, but what I do know is that it applies that kind of error to
everything. All of recorded human is squeezed into the period from 800 AD to today with most of it being crammed between 1000 AD and 1500 AD.